Our man Millis is a Climax Golden Twin and a noted
curator of globe trotting / time traveling esoterica, amongst other
accolades. In the former category, Millis and Jeffery Taylor steadily
release some of the most headscratching amalgamations of avant-rock,
decontextualized temple music, heightened-state minimalism, and collaged
field recordings this side of the Sun City Girls (including the
soundtrack to the cult film Session Nine); and in the latter, Millis has published a number of acclaimed anthologies for Sublime Frequencies (Scattered Melodies, This World is Unreal Like a Snake in a Rope, Phi Ta Khon, The Crying Princess, etc.) and Dust-To-Digital (our personal favorite, aptly titled Victrola Favorites).
With his fingers in so many jars of jam, it can seem like an uncommon
occurrence for Millis to release solo work although he is one to smear
his sticky hands all over himself in performance, installation, and
collaboration. Thus, The Helen Scarsdale Agency is delighted in
presenting his latest opus, Relief.
A fever dream of blurred harmonics and ethnomusicological spelunking, Relief repeatedly
returns to variations on a peculiar yet beautifully serpentine drone,
whose twinkling acoustic properties meld the hallucinatory mouth-music
of the Bangladeshi Murung people and the curved air hypnosis of Terry
Riley. Millis bookends and interrupts his mysterious miasma with comedic
interludes snatched from his lauded collection of antique 78s, maudlin
piano tone-clusters, and teleported crescendos of spectral ballroom
waltzes. More Nurse With Wound than The Caretaker, this polyglot
raga-drone of daytime somnambulism and psychedelic slipperiness speaks
to the uneasy borders at psychological, cultural, and geophysical states
of being. Oh, to be a human on this planet. - www.helenscarsdale.com/

Gorgeous collection of soundscapes and field recordings from Sublime
Frequencies' Robert Millis* Sublime Frequencies and Parlotone
contributor and former Climax Golden Twin Robert Millis presents a
cryptic episode for the excellent Helen Scarsdale Agency. 'Relief' was
composed between 2010-2012 and surveys esoteric, itinerant soundscapes
segueing between mercurial tones, drones and crackling textures imbued
with the sort of unique feel for timbre that you might expect from a
head involved in far-reaching compilations such as the amazing 'Folk
& Pop Sounds Of Sumatra Volume 1' or 'Scattered Melodies: Korean
Kayagum Sanjo from 78RPM Records' and much more beside. Processed
recordings of guitar, organ and acousmatic sources swell in strange
shapes and tantalising harmonic hues rich in queered overtones,
transporting us from the shimmering, piquant dissonance of 'Secret
Sentence' to ghostly, Philip Jeck-like atmospheres in 'Second Lord of
the Auspicious Conjunction' via singing gospel church organ and droning
overtones in 'Enjoyment Machine' and onwards, inwards to rippling
gamelan and chanting field recordings reminding of Loren Nerrell or Kink
Gong on 'Awaj Arepo' and one expansive finale 'Relief'. It feels as
though the whole LP is setting us up to this final piece, where any of
the record's more distinct signifiers melt into an even more
impressionistic ether of lush, listing overtones and pensile percussion
counting time like an ancient water clock before gently returning us to
waking life with soft keys and denser drones. It's genuinely enchanting
music... - boomkat

INSTALLATIONS and MISCELLANEOUS PROJECTS

Within/Without (artXchange gallery, Seattle, WA, 2012). Sound for site specific installation.
A site specific sound, sculpture and light installation created for the artXchange
Gallery in Seattle, WA in 2012. A collaboration with visual artist June
Sekiguchi after an invitation from Prince Nithakong Somsanith for an
artist residency in Laos. Composed from hours of recordings made in Laos
of natural ambiance, music, Buddhist worship, and traditional bamboo
instruments.

Fragments (of the Story) was installed at Jack Straw Productions New
Media Gallery from February to April 2011. It is in part an audio
rendering of a novel by Allen Frost called The Mermaid Translation (Bird
Dog Publishing, 2010). All the sounds and words of this installation
are derived from this book. Actually it is less a precise rendering and
more a remembering of the events this novel recounts and as such the
novel provides the framework on which to hang the ideas explored in the
installation. I would hazard that most of us do not simply remember
things verbatim from start to finish, as a story. Memories are
abstracted by how we remember, by the addition of new memories, by time.
There are fragments: snatches of dialog, sounds, interpretations,
improvisations, smells, tastes, emotions, memories on top of memories,
that our brains put together to form some sort of whole. This process
can and often does go partially or fully awry.
I collect very old 78rpm records. To play them I have an old wind-up
Victrola. To adjust the “volume” on this purely acoustic sound
reproducer you must pull a knob which literally opens and shuts a door
to block or muffle the sound. 78rpm records are, in a way, old memories.
Victrolas store and replay these memories. This installation has almost
nothing to do with Victrolas and 78rpm records but that was the
starting point. From there, somehow, the leap to filing cabinets—each
with their own potential resonant qualities—and to the idea of filing
away memories and to the thought that viewers could open and close
drawers full of auditory memories to create their own narrative or
soundscape.

“What is human memory?” Manning asked. He gazed at the air as he
spoke, as if lecturing an invisible audience – as perhaps he was. “It
certainly is not a passive recording mechanism, like a digital disc or a
tape. It is more like a story-telling machine. Sensory information is
broken down into shards of perception, which are broken down again to be
stored as memory fragments. And at night, as the body rests, these
fragments are brought out from storage, reassembled and replayed. Each
run-through etches them deeper into the brain’s neural structure. And
each time a memory is rehearsed or recalled it is elaborated. We may add
a little, lose a little, tinker with the logic, fill in sections that
have faded, perhaps even conflate disparate events. In extreme cases, we
refer to this as confabulation. The brain creates and recreates the
past, producing, in the end, a version of events that may bear little
resemblance to what actually occurred. To first order, I believe it’s
true to say that everything I remember is false.”
–Arthur C. Clarke
It’s surprising how much of memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.
–Barbara Kingsolver
We live in the mind, in ideas, in fragments. We no longer drink in the wild outer music of the streets – we remember only.
–Henry Miller

Talking Machine from 2005, installed at the In Resonance show for
One Reel/Bumbershoot in Seattle, WA. Designed as a conversation between
two vintage wind-up Victrolas (the earliest sound reproduction devices
were called “talking machines”), Talking Machine explored the resonance
of these old wooden acoustic “record players” while creating a collage
of voices from the past. All audio was derived from old 78rpm
records—including comedy routines, presidential speeches, minstrel
shows, stories and music.

Essay and images in La presencia del sonido, catalog published through the Fundacio Botin, Santander, Spain.

Victrola Favorites (through Dust to Digital), published in 2008.Victrola Favorites is a 144 page clothbound art book with
two CDs I designed and produced in collaboration with Jeffery Taylor and
John Hubbard, released by Dust-to-Digital in 2008. The book documents
my collection of 78rpm records and printed ephemera from the early days
of recording. Victrola favorites began life as a series of cassettes
released in the late 90s. Information is available HERE also HERE.Similarly, in 2011, Dust-to-Digital released a book called …i listen to the wind that obliterates my traces which I produced along with artist Steve Roden. …i listen to the wind documents
Steve’s collections of music related photographs and 78rpm records.
More information on Steve and his work is available HERE.Further, I have done design work for a variety of labels and artists. More information is available HERE.Not sure who put this video together, but…thanks:

DESIGN

Graphic design for LPs, CDs and books more information can be found here.Sublime Frequencies–numerous
LP, CD and DVD designs including Group Doueh, Group Inerane, Princess
Nicotine, Music of the Nat Pwe, Minority Music from Xinjiang, Palace of
the Winds.Secret Museum of Mankind (Yazoo Records, Outernational Media). Design for gatefold LPs of seminal ethnic music compilations.Excavated Shellac: Strings(Dust
to Digital, Atlanta, GA 2009). Designed and assisted with production
on LP devoted to 78rpm recordings of string music from around the world.Au Claire de la Lune
(7 inch single Dust to Digital/First Sounds, Atlanta, GA 2009) Design
and production assistance on 7 inch documentation of the earliest
recording of the human voice (from 1860).Take Me to the Water (Book/CD,
Dust to Digital, Atlanta, GA, 2009-nominated for a Grammy Award,
2009) Design and production assistance on Grammy-nominated compilation
of historic photographs and music.Victrola Favorites (Book/double CD, Dust to Digital, Atlanta, GA, 2008)

SUBLIME FREQUENCIES

Excerpts of documentary videos I filmed, edited and produced for the Sublime Frequencies label.
These documentaries are designed to create a “you are there” or
“stranger in a strange land” experience. Narration-less, they rely on
sound (music, ambiance, etc) and abstraction as their primary focus. All
have been released on DVD and have received numerous screenings in the
US and Europe. In addition to video documentary work for Sublime I have
released several CD compilations of field recordings (from Nepal and SE
Asia) on the label and created many of the label’s LP and CD cover
designs.
SUBLIME FREQUENCIES is a collective of explorers dedicated to
acquiring and exposing obscure sights and sounds from modern and
traditional urban and rural frontiers via film and video, field
recordings, radio and short wave transmissions, international folk and
pop music, sound anomalies, and other forms of human and natural
expression not documented sufficiently…

Flatform - Quantum + Trento Symphonia + Movements of an Impossible Time + A Place to Come + Can Not Be Anything Against the Wind + 57.600 Seconds of Invisible Night and Light + Sunday 6th April, 11:42 a.m. + About zero + With Nature There Are no Special Effects, Only Consequences (f)

Ben Rivers - The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes are not Brothers (f)

Cheryl Frances-Hoad - Glory Tree (m)

Thomas Adès - The Twenty-Fifth Hour (m)

Daníel Bjarnason - Over Light Earth + Processions + Solaris (m)

Dobrinka Tabakova - String Paths (m)

Jacek Sienkiewicz - Nomatter (m)

Veli-Matti Puumala - Anna Liisa (m)

Bill Douglas - Trilogy: My Childhood, My Ain Folk, My Way Home (f)

DIALECT - Gowanus Drifts (m)

Robert Enrico - Au coeur de la vie (f)

Kara-lis Coverdale & LXV - Sirens (m)

Uljana Wolf - i mean i dislike that fate that i was made to where (b)

Mempo Giardinelli - Sultry Moon (b)

Jean-Marie Straub - Dialogue d'ombres (f)

Klaus Hoffer - Among the Bieresch (b)

Maxim Biller - U glavi Brune Schulza (b)

Svend Åge Madsen - Days with Diam + Virtue & Vice in the Middle Time (b)